Lela Harris

Lela Harris, Miss Lambe, 2025

Harris has created a compelling new portrait of Miss Lambe, the only character of African heritage in Austen’s novels, from her unfinished manuscript ‘Sanditon’, which is also on display as part of the exhibition.

Miss Lambe is unique in Austen’s writing: a young, wealthy heiress of African heritage who had a ‘maid of her own’ and ‘was always of the first consequence in every plan’. Her great fortune tempts unscrupulous characters to imagine acquiring her wealth through marriage.

Harris’s portrait of Miss Lambe remains unfinished, echoing both the unfinished nature of ‘Sanditon’ as well as highlighting the historic erasure of women of colour from archival spaces. Detail is concentrated in Miss Lambe’s face and hands, giving Austen’s character life, whilst incomplete areas of clothing reflect the sitter’s untold narrative. Like Austen’s handwritten manuscript, Harris’s technical adjustments can be seen in these unfinished areas.

The portrait’s picture surface has been pieced together using 20th-century stationery from Harewood House. In her preparatory work for this portrait, Harris used the technique of collage to build a picture of Miss Lambe beyond Austen’s unfinished manuscript, imagining the character within the context of Harewood and its complex histories and collections. Through this portrait, Harris bridges the gap between fact, fiction and historical imagination.

Preparatory collages for Miss Lambe, 2025

Lela Harris is an artist best known for her portraits often depicting those who have been overlooked or marginalised by history. These collages form a body of preparatory work for Harris’s new portrait of Miss Lambe, a character from Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon.

Harris’s collages centre around an imagined visit to Harewood by Miss Lambe in 1817. Using cut-outs from catalogues, postcards and archival photographs of

Black Victorians and twentieth-century workers, Harris pieces together a vision of what this experience might have been like for a mixed-race woman, in a playful, empathetic way. Harris uses collage to build a picture of Austen’s character beyond the incomplete manuscript, rooted instead within the context of Harewood and its complex histories and collections. In doing so, Harris bridges the gap between fact, fiction and historical imagination.